


The Villain’s Defeat (for a given value of defeat)

by Wapwani



Series: Dragon Queen prompt responses [9]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), dragon queen - Fandom
Genre: AU, Crack, F/F, don't even ask me where this came from, stuff I'm moving over from tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-06
Updated: 2018-12-06
Packaged: 2019-09-12 23:07:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16880994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wapwani/pseuds/Wapwani
Summary: The Mayor of Storybrooke defends her one-liners (and town) from a mysterious magical foe.





	The Villain’s Defeat (for a given value of defeat)

**Author's Note:**

> This may be the crackiest thing I’ve ever written. And I’ve written about Feegles in Storybrooke, and no one noticing that Worf was replaced by a hologram.
> 
> Originally written (in 2016!) over on tumblr, (in response to a post by punlich which I'll put in the endnotes, because spoilers, sweetie.) Someone re-read it recently and reminded me of it. So now it's here, so I don't have to go hunting for it again.

The citizens of Storybrooke were a happy bunch. Well, they had no reason not to be, really; they lived an almost fairytale existence. The town had: an entire street of houses made of candy and cake (intern witches needed the practice), fields of talking animals who spouted witticisms and wisdom to anyone who cared to listen (and free ear plugs for those who didn’t), and a royal family who were so incredibly jovial that songbirds literally followed the Queen around wherever she went. But best of all was their Mayor.

The Mayor’s office was where the true power lay. Everyone knew this, even the royal family. The royal family would swan around Storybrooke being charming, shaking hands and asking everyone if they were happy, and the Princess and the King would ride off to battle whenever necessary, carrying their big shiny swords. But it hardly ever came to that, because of the Mayor. She ruled Storybrooke with an iron fist, using her magic to ensure everyone’s happy ending with a ruthlessness that would have frankly been quite terrifying if she wasn’t making everyone’s lives so much better.

Word about Storybrooke got around, words like ‘we’ve not had a bout of dysentery since we moved here’, and 'I haven’t had to dig an outdoor toilet in years’. People moved to the town in droves; they’d petition the Queen, who could not say no to a sad face, and she’d grant them leave to stay. The Mayor would just roll her eyes and then roll up her sleeves, and make sure there’d be new zoning laws, and construction projects, and an expansion in agricultural outputs and other services, and everything else she needed to do to keep Storybrooke one of the happiest places in the entire Enchanted Forest. As a result, all sorts of people moved to Storybrooke - from dwarfs to dragons.

 

Life was going almost boringly well, until one morning, the citizens of Storybrooke woke up to find themselves in the middle of a scourge of magic.

Every street in downtown Storybrooke, (a bustling hive of activity that included Granny’s (the best restaurant in the Enchanted Forest), the Castle, all the best shops, and the Mayor’s office), was completely choked off by fast growing vines. Everywhere the people turned, there were thick stems and glossy leaves and purple flowers the size of a man’s head. The flowers put off a stench that filled the air with such a cloying sweetness, anyone coming near the downtown area had to wear a gas mask. None of the Mayor’s spells would work to tear the vines out; every time she destroyed one branch, it seemed three more grew to take its place. They had to evacuate the downtown area. Granny managed to salvage most of her pots and pans, and she set up an emergency location under a tent down by the river, so it wasn’t such a terrible loss. But the royal family had to move into a two bedroom loft, (which they took with their customary good grace), and the Mayor had to start working from home. Which irritated her no end, so she wasn’t at all pleased when she woke up the following morning to a group of petitioners at her door, covered in a dripping brown gloop that reeked of chocolate.

Every river in Storybrooke had been turned into liquid chocolate. The rivers were linked to the town’s reservoir, so every drop of water was now warm viscous chocolate. Turn on a tap, nothing but oozing chocolate. All that indoor plumbing that people were so fond of? Bunged up and useless with chocolate.

It took the Mayor the entire day to seal off the reservoirs and flush (so to speak) the chocolate from the pipes. It took her half the night to magically refill the reservoir, and seal the rivers off from tainting the fresh water with more chocolate. Because nothing she did would turn the rivers back to normal.

So she was sleep-deprived and grumpy when she headed to Granny’s for a morning pick-me-up of triple-strength coffee and a stack of pancakes.

Only to find the tent in an uproar and no sign of Granny.

“Someone has kidnapped her!” Granny’s granddaughter wailed. Red was a good cook and a decent waitress, but she couldn’t feed the entire population of Storybrooke by herself. She turned pleading eyes on the Mayor. “Please find her!”

The King and Princess helped her look, but it was the Mayor who finally tracked Granny down. It was after nightfall, and the air was clear, the stars glittering like a sweep of diamonds in the dark sky. Granny was at the very top of the local mountain, with all of Storybrooke spread below her, chocolate rivers and all. She was standing in front of a stove, cooking up a storm.

“I’ve been cursed!” she cried as she caught sight of the Mayor. “I can’t break free! Not until all this food is eaten!”

“How do you know that?” the Mayor demanded.

Granny waved a menu at her. And sure enough, the last line of the menu outlined the characteristics of the curse. Granny had to cook everything on the menu, someone else had to eat everything on the menu, and only then would she be free.

There were 12 items on the menu.

Three of them were chocolate desserts.

The Mayor’s fury was so incandescent by the time she’d eaten the final mouthful, Granny could have fried her breakfast eggs on her forehead.

 

The Mayor slept fitfully, with two empty bottles of a fizzy antacid drink by her bedside. She woke fearful of what the day would bring. She had been so busy trying to deflect and fix the problems, she hadn’t had time to give any thought to finding out  _who_  was tormenting her city.

What she did find was the King and Princess at her door, shouting about dragons.

A dragon had descended on Storybrooke.

Not just any dragon.

Maleficent. The Mistress of all Evil. She had handed out cards so people would be sure to know that.

She was standing in the middle of the city, next to something that looked like a giant explosive device, and she was cackling about how she was going to destroy them all if it was the last thing she did.

The Mayor snarled, “No dragon is going to steal  _my_  lines!” (Or destroy her city, of course. She did mean that too. But the Mayor’s priorities sometimes came out a little skewed).

She stormed into the city to find things just as the King and Princess had reported. Maleficent was outside the Mayor’s office, surrounded by the putridly sweet stench of the vines. She was dressed in (the Mayor had to admit admiringly) a magnificent robe, her hair was shiny and fell to her shoulders in soft waves, her face perfectly made up with dramatic shadows around her eyes and deep red gloss on her lips. She stood next to a metal vault the size of a large man; there was a giant clock-face on the front of it that was ticking ominously backwards.

“Get out of my town!” the Mayor shouted, a little flustered by how attractive she found the dragon.

“Make me!” the dragon shouted back.

It was not an exchange that would be recorded in the history books for its wit or snappy use of dialogue. But the battle that did follow was epic enough to make up for it.

Magic flew back and forth, sizzling against shields and ricochetting off to create small fires in the vines, or tear chunks of masonry off the surrounding buildings. The air glowed with the power the two women were expending and the ground heaved under them. The dragon’s strategy was to stand in one place and fling everything she could against the Mayor, while the other woman was wily and maneuvered herself closer and closer until she could finally deliver a killing blast of magic - directed at the metal vault.

The ticking stopped, the dragon turned towards the vault, and the Mayor leaped. She cannoned into the dragon, knocking her flat on her back, and straddled her.

“And stay down,” she snarled.

Maleficent raked her gaze over the victorious Mayor, taking in her disheveled hair and the heaving chest that made the buttons of her shirt strain. She licked her lips.

“This isn’t over.”

“Oh, I think it is,” the Mayor said, smiling triumphantly, her eyes shining with glee. “You’re defeated.”

“Look again,” Maleficent grinned.

And surely enough, the clock-face had survived, and was still ticking, counting down towards the giant red zero that probably signaled all their doom.

“What did you do?”

“Failsafe.”

“Turn it off!”

“I can’t.”

“Are you insane?!”

“There’s only one way to stop it.”

_“Tell_  me!”

“It’s linked to my lipstick.”

“You have to kiss the bomb?! You  _are_ insane.”

“No! It’s a chemical reaction. My lipstick has to meld with…another substance…and that will stop the device.”

The dragon suddenly sounded, oddly enough, incredibly shy. The Mayor frowned.

“What other substance. Tell me at once!”

“yerlpstick” Maleficent mumbled.

“What is that? I’ve never heard of-”

Maleficent cleared her throat, and said more clearly, “ _Your_  lipstick.”

“What.”

“My lipstick has to meld with your lipstick to stop the bomb. I thought I was being very clear that time.”

“I don’t have my handbag with me!”

“Ten seconds,” Maleficent pointed out helpfully, glancing at the clock-face. “Be creative.”

Regina stared at her.

“Fine!”

She grabbed Maleficent’s face in her hands, leaned down and kissed her.

She intended it to be just a perfunctory pressing of their lips together, so she could mash the colour off her own lips into Maleficent’s, but the moment she touched the dragon, all she could think of was how good this felt. The kiss lengthened and she lingered, exploring Maleficent’s lips and the warmth of her mouth. She pulled back with a gasp. The dragon was staring up at her with wonder in her eyes, and her mouth was slightly parted, her lips covered with a faint sheen of fading magic. In the background, Regina registered that she no longer heard the ticking of the clock, and no explosion had followed. Regina lowered her head and kissed Maleficent again.

When she pulled back this time, her chest was heaving even more than before, although for a different reason.  Showing ether great restraint or just how sappy being in Regina’s presence made her, Maleficent’s wondering gaze stayed fixed on the Mayor’s face.

“Why are you trying to destroy Storybrooke?” Regina asked at last, when she’d regained some control over her instinctive reactions (which, it has to be said, were to keep kissing the dragon.)

“I’m not,” Maleficent said, her voice confused. “I was trying to…Oh I’m not very good at this. It’s different for dragons. We can tell by scent and scale colours. But humans are different.”

“What are you talking about?!”

“Human courtship, of course. I did do my research! You present the object of your desire with various gifts and rituals.”

“Object of desire,” Regina stuttered, feeling the heat spread through her in a not unpleasant fashion.

“Yes. My research was quite thorough. Flowers-”

“Oh good stars. The vines.”

“Chocolate.”

“Not  _liquid_  chocolate!”

“Yes, sorry. That spell did get away from me a little. It was supposed to rain down on you.”

Regina thought about great boulder-sized chunks of chocolate falling from the sky. Chocolate rivers didn’t seem so bad anymore.

“How did you get to kidnapping and force feeding?”

“Umm…a nice dinner in a romantic setting?”

“Of course. And an explosion that would destroy us all? What was that? Make the earth move for her?”

“Oh, I thought that part came later. This was ask for a kiss.”

“Ask for…you were asking for…”

“I must say, I wasn’t very convinced about human courtship rituals. But they do seem to have worked-”

“They have not  _worked!”_

“You kissed me. Twice.”

“Well…yes. But not because of- Oh good  _stars!_  Fine. Yes. Yes, I suppose, it did work. A little! But there will be no more kissing!”

“Oh?”

It turned out the effect of a pouting dragon was even more difficult to defeat than flowering vines and rivers of chocolate.

“Not until you fix everything! Put everything back the way it was. And apologise to Granny! She’s too terrified to go back into the kitchen, and I miss my pancakes!”

“Whatever you say,” Maleficent said docilely.

“And then we can work out the rest of your punishment.”

Maleficent perked up considerably at the tone of Regina’s voice.

Regina got to her feet and reached down to help the dragon up. “We’ll see how creative you can get. On that 'making the earth move’ thing.”

 

Yes, everyone came to Storybrooke to find their happy endings. Even (not-so-)villainous dragons.

 

* * *

 

_[The post that inspired this](http://punlich.tumblr.com/post/141881533368/heroine-on-top-of-the-villain-lady-holding-her) _

 

**Author's Note:**

> The post that inspired this fic:
> 
> Heroine: *on top of the Villain Lady holding her down* You are defeated  
> Villain Lady: you forgot about my secret weapon  
> Villain Lady: it can only be defused by kissing me on the mouth  
> Heroine: ...  
> Heroine: you know you could've just asked me out instead of taking over this city  
> Villain Lady: I'M AWKWARD OK?


End file.
